The Fifieth Anniversary of the U.S. Navy's P3 Aircraft

This year I am marking the fiftieth birthday of an old friend. This article is about my experience with one of the most durable aircraft in the United States Navy. The technical information for this article comes from a Time Magazine article that was published on March 2, 1959; I have the article preserved in plastic.

The article introduces the U.S. Navy's deadliest submarine hunter. The first incarnation of the P3 was the P3-V1 Electra. It was built on a Lockheed Electra airframe and was powered by four GM-Allison prop-jets. This version of the aircraft was specifically made to be an anti-submarine warfare (ASW) weapon. Its predominant feature was a long pointed structure that jutted beyond the tail of the aircraft. It looked like, and was dubbed, a stinger. The stinger contained magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) gear. It was sensitive to variations in the magnetic field caused by a submarine underwater. It could locate a submarine and attack it buy dropping depth charges.

To find a submarine the P3 needed another unique ability. Its powerful engines could get it to its patrol station quickly but then two of the engines could be turned off. The plane could fly slow and still maintain altitude; this was called loitering. This was very important to search operations.

I first saw the P3 in its later version as a P3 Orion. This was 1977 and I was doing some ASW work at Moffet Naval Air Station in California. I was not involved with the P3 squadrons at that time; I was working the problem from another angle. This was in the bad old days of the Cold War and we were doing our best to keep an eye on the Russian submarines.

It was six years later that I actually worked with the P3 community. I worked with a P3 that had a slightly different purpose. It was called an EP3 and it was an electronic warfare (EW) bird. Its missions took it over land and sea. In 1983 I was working as a contractor to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC. We supported the Navy with new EW systems. I flew as a technical representative. The first flights were part of the system's proof of concept flights using NRL's own EP3. We started with test runs over the Chesapeake Bay and then we took the aircraft to Germany and then to Sicily. It was a unique experience doing my job while cruising over, what was then, the Iron Curtain, and later over the Mediterranean.

In the following years I would fly training missions with VQ-1 in the Pacific and VQ-2 in the Mediterranean. They certainly weren't luxury flights but the old girl was twenty-five years old and it was still solid. On the flights the crew of twenty-five would work their stations. The large cabin was only illuminated be red lights to allow all of the buttons and displays on the equipment to be seen easily.

There were a few adventures during the training missions, but nothing like was these men and women face on real missions. We did have a F14 Tom Cat come up on our wing when we flew over the Eisenhower battle group. We also had a Russian fighter come up on our wing to see what we were up to; there was never any danger.

I can attest to the sturdiness of the aircraft from person experience. We took off from the Philippines in a storm for a planned mission over the South China Sea. Before we could clear the clouds the aircraft was struck directly on the nose by a bolt of lightning. The crew in the back didn't know it happened. The strike did mess up some of the avionics so we did have to return to base, but the aircraft was fine.

What I have described is the P3 that I know; there are many variations of the P3. You can see a listing of the types of P3 on Wikipedia. It's been fifty years since the Time Magazine article was written and the old girl is still in service.